Distributive Justice In Egalitarian Perspective

In a broad sense, distributive justice can be understood as dealing with the problem how to distribute various benefits and burdens among people. This kind of distributive justice amounts to social justice. But in this paper I discuss another kind of distributive justice in a narrow sense, which only refers to the distribution of economic benefits and burdens among people.According to Aristotle, justice is some kind of equality. The same is true of distributive justice. However, the job to reveal in depth the conceptual connections between equality and justice did not go well in the history of western thought until recent30years. Contemporary debate over egalitarianism in western academe makes some progress in this direction so that egalitarianism has become one of important theories of distributive justice. Despite the other three competing theories—prioritarianism, sufficientarianism and meritocracy, they, properly understood, are still variants of egalitarianism in some sense.Some clarifications for the concept of equality and its values are made before explicating the general features and implications of egalitarianism. In this paper it is emphasized in particular that egalitarianism does not claim complete equality in very respect. Rather it leaves some space for inequalities as well as equalities. The size of the space for inequalities rests on their justifiability. The justifiability in turn tends to depend on two main moral principles:desert principle and need principle. But contemporary discussion in egalitarianism heavily relies on desert principle, because it focuses on the undeserved inequalities derived from brute luck such as accident birth or talents of people. The undeserved inequalities are regarded as unfair or unjust since they can not be justified. Due to this feature, contemporary egalitarianism is primarily represented as "luck egalitarianism". The principal aim of luck egalitarianism is to neutralize the effects of brute luck upon people's distributive shares and hold people responsible for their choices, in other words, make people really deserve their distributive shares. However, a controversy was conducted among proponents of luck egalitarianism over the question what ideal of equality could really achieve the aim. Two typical kinds of luck egalitarianism—Richard Dworkin's theory of equality of resources and Richard Anerson's theory of equal opportunity for welfare-are investigated in this paper. Not only their defects but also the general shortcomings of luck egalitarianism are revealed. Consequently, I claim the distributive justice for democratic equality through the interpretation and employment of the thoughts of Amartya Sen, John Rawls and Elizabeth Anderson. Distributive justice for democratic equality demands substantial equal citizenship in a society, which will use Sen's criterion of capability to measure citizenship.Distributive justice for democratic equality implies that government should make some redistributive measures, i.e. regulate the distribution of wealth and income generated by free market by some means such as taxation and welfare supply so as to narrow the inequality in people's capabilities. But libertarians criticize redistributive measures because they think that redistribution will violate people's absolute ownership of their property which does not permit redistributive measures. Libertarians provide three main arguments for justifying absolute ownership. But they are respectively rebutted by the author. Furthermore, I propose the egalitarian ownership which serves for distributive justice for democratic equality. According to this ownership, redistribution does not violate people's ownership of their property.In the end, I discuss how democracy can guarantee the implementation of distributive justice for democratic equality. On the one hand, democracy can satisfy the intrinsic requirements of distributive justice for democratic equality. On the other hand, the mechanism of check-and-balance in democracy favors the performance of positive redistributive policies.